Peace Like a River

Before I start a new book, I "preview" it like I taught my English 115 students to do. I always read the first paragraph or two, a litmus test which tells me whether I want to read the book at all. I read the back cover, I browse the internet, and I read the blurbs pulled from professional reviews. Among the many glowing reviews for Peace Like a River, there is this:

"Peace Like a River serves as a reminder of why we read fiction to
begin with: to commune with a vividly, lovingly rendered world, to
lose ourselves in story and language and beauty, to savor what we don't
want to end yet know must."

I was going to try to come up with my own reasons for reading, but I couldn't top that, which is why Andrew Roe of the San Francisco Chronicle makes the cover of best-selling novels and while I post to an anonymous little blog that no one reads. :-) I would just add that I read to meet and know fascinating characters.

At any rate, Mr. Roe got it right—Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger, has all this and more. First, character: Reuben Land, an 11-year-old boy who suffers from asthma, is the book's narrator, looking back through the lenses of memory and adulthood. His younger sister Swede is a virtuoso in heroic verse on Old Western outlawry. She is so precocious that at first I wondered if the author had ever met an 8 year old, but Swede's family is crazy about her, and I soon found her entirely lovable. Their father, Jeremiah, a promising medical student-turned janitor, has an unusually conversational relationship with the Lord. It's not just that he's devoutly religious, or even particularly eccentric. He holds dialogue with God that no one else is privy to (including the reader), at one point even going toe-to-toe in what appears to be an actual physical struggle. (He doesn't win.) Oh, and did I mention he works miracles? There are more characters of course, but these are the ones we get to know best. This family of "tender-hearted stoics" (another reviewer's phrasing that I couldn't improve on) is drawn with such care and affection that they seem real, and wonderful. You want to bring them home and warm them up and feed them and, above all, listen to their story.

World: The novel is set in the northern Great Plains during the harshest of winters, a place that is not hard to imagine for someone blessed to live in the temperate Pacific Northwest only because of the author's skill in describing winds so severe they create blizzards when it's not snowing, and temperatures so cold that 19° is considered "brisk." It's a great backdrop for the story, and the perfect contrast to a wondrous glimpse of the afterlife that comes late in the book.

Story: Reuben's older brother Davy has been charged with murder, having shot and killed two boys who broke into their home with intent to do harm. When the trial takes a turn for the worse, Davy breaks out of jail and goes on the lam. His family follows him into the Badlands of North Dakota, a hostile world of superlative cold and also of fire and brimstone. They meet both comfort and tragedy along the way, and the story's conclusion shows the redemptive power of love and faith and family.

Language: Leif Enger has an exceptional talent with language, never mind the ripping-good story. The tone is conversational, and the word choice is always spot-on. The language is surprisingly literary, employing such wisdom and clarity that sometimes I found myself reading a sentence over and over to let it roll around and sink in. He even makes up his own words sometimes, like "grayscape" and "smouch" which I think means "to swipe," as in, "I smouched some gingersnaps." I wanted to find the perfect passage to give you a sample, but there are so many from which to choose. This will have to do:

Her hair was roped back in a French braid from which it was very winningly coming loose, and she held before her a picnic basket with a clasped lid. For heartening sights nothing beats a well-packed picnic basket. One so full it creaks. One carried by a lady you would walk on tacks for. Does all this make her sound beautiful to you? Because she was—oh, yes. Though she hadn't seemed so to me a week before, when she turned and faced us I was confused at her beauty and could only scratch and look down at my shoetops, as the dumbfounded have done through the centuries. Swede was wordless too, though later in an epic fervor she would render into verse Roxanna's moment of transfiguration. I like the phrase, which hasn't been thrown around that much since the High Renaissance, but truly I suppose that moment had been gaining on us, secretly, like a new piece of music played while you sleep. One day you hear it—a strange song, yet one you know by heart.

I chose that paragraph because it's a good example of the author's personable voice (he addresses the reader as though he's telling you the story personally), and it also has a few great examples of his just-right phrasing—e.g. the part about the picnic basket and also the scratching and looking down at shoetops.

And that leaves beauty. There is beauty in the language, in the place and time the language evokes, in character and in theme. It's a wise and thoughtful and faith-inducing book.

My apologies to those who will tire of me raving about every book I read, but I don't usually read a book unless I'm quite convinced I will like it. And I really liked this one. And it did remind me why I read fiction. It's a miracle of a book which I heartily recommend to all my darling sisters.

A final note from my internet research: The name of the book comes from Isaiah 48:18 and 66:12. There is also a hymn of the same name:

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.